Joseph Scott

Since the economic markets started imploding in a major way earlier this year we’ve hear a lot about about “credit default swaps” (CDS). I’ve seen a few attempts to explain what these particular financial tools are but still didn’t feel like I had a good grasp on what they were.

Last night 60 Minutes had a segment on CDS (The Bet That Blew Up Wall Street) which I think does a pretty good job of spelling out what these beasts are. The audio is pretty poor, but it’s worth the 12 minutes and 26 seconds to watch:

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After seeing this it seems pretty clear that the limitations the government removed eight years ago was not really a good idea. Not one Senator voted against it. Anyone know if they’ve learned their lesson and moved to make this illegal again?

While the Automattic crew was in Colorado last week we were working on new features and tonight we’re opening a beta for the one of those - comment replies via email. This is a new capability that we’ve added to WordPress.com that allows you to reply to a comment simply by replying to the comment notification email that gets sent out to post authors when someone leaves a new comment. Here’s a quick video that shows how it works:

To start with we are calling for beta testers. If you want to get in on the beta leave a comment on the announcement post specifying what the URL of your WordPress.com blog is. We’ll be adding users to the beta until 7pm (Utah time) Friday 24 October 2008.

I have a personal attachment to this feature, Barry, Jon Fox (from IntenseDebate) and I worked on this while in Colorado. So I’ll be keeping on eye on how the beta testing goes.

I’ve been using Gmail to varying degrees for a few years, but it wasn’t until the last week or so that I started exploring the contacts feature:

Looks like a pretty standard list of attributes: name, email, phone, address, IM, work and notes. After filling in this form a few times there was one field that was obviously missing. Where’s the URL field? There’s no place to indicate the personal home page for the contact, or for the website of their company. This struck me as incredibly odd, we’re talking about Google after all! Discovering and indexing web content is their core service, so this omission seems particularly strange.

To their credit I will say that it’s good to see that many of the fields can have as many values as you want. There doesn’t appear to be any limit on the number email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, IM accounts, or others for each contact. What in the world is an ‘other’ any way? There’s one other quirk with the fields, the IM options don’t include Skype.

I like that you can add an image to the contact, which shows up in emails from people in your contacts. This brought up another problem though. Contacts support three export formats: Google’s CSV, Outlook’s CSV and vCard. I’ve looked at my contact list exported into all three formats and could find no hint of an image for each contact. The contacts data API appears to provide access to photos. I’ve only skimmed the reference guide so far, but it looks promising.

So what do you say Google, can we get URL fields added to contacts and Skype added to the list of IM options? For a bonus point exposing the contact image URL in the export files would be swell. Oh, and while I’m at it, how about making Gmail Labs features available for Google Apps users. Thanks.

Welcome to josephscott.org. I’m making a break with my previous site/blog (joseph.randomnetworks.com) and starting from scratch. I’m leaving all of the content up on the old site and even leaving comments open. I’ve got a few posts that get traffic everyday and have become more of a forum for help on specific issues than static blog post.

There’s something liberating about starting over. We’ll just have see where this takes us.